University Outstanding Research Mentorship Award

This award recognizes the extraordinary efforts by a faculty and/or staff member for providing outstanding research mentoring to UCCS students, staff, research associates, and/or faculty. A research mentor can facilitate another person’s research development and research success in a number of ways, including by promoting access to information and resources, facilitating skill development and networking, and/or serving as a coach for navigating the research landscape. A research mentor fosters the success of individual students, staff, research associates, and/or faculty members. Our goal is to acknowledge the impact of research mentors in creating a positive culture of research at UCCS.

2023 Outstanding Research Mentor: Jugal Kalita, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science

Kalita has been a professor at UCCS since the fall of 1990. He has taught over twenty-five different classes in all aspects of Computer Science, published over 250 papers with 12,500 citations and received a dozen NSF grants. His areas of research are Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He has also authored four research-focused books and three textbooks, including two published in 2023: single-author “Machine Learning: Theory and Practice” by CRC Press in January 2023, and “Fundamentals of Data Science: Theory and Practice”, co-authored with two others, published in November 2023.

Kalita has been an advisor for 100 undergraduate independent studies and 75 master’s theses and projects. He has also been a Ph.D. supervisor for more than 20 students and received the Computer Science Department’s “The Teacher Who Taught Me Most” award, as voted by students, in 2017 and 2021. Kalita was also awarded EAS College Teacher of the Year in 2001, the Service Excellence Award in 2005 and Researcher of the Year in 2011. He received the Chancellor’s Award in 2011 in recognition of his superior contribution to teaching, service and research at UCCS and, most recently, received the campus’s Research Mentor Award in 2023.